‘You have to hypnotise the dancers and establish a heated, creative, amorous atmosphere. It’s very challenging – but if you look at them when they leave, they’ve been through an emotional, sometimes ecstatic creative act.’

Blimey. There are no half-measures with Eifman – he makes dance pumped full of soul-baring passion and often a raunchy sexuality. It’s this approach that saw his work labelled ‘pornographic’ by Soviet authorities when he was forging a lonely path with Red Russia’s only contemporary dance company.

And, post-perestroika, it’s seen him transformed from dissident to award-garlanded establishment darling, with President Putin attending his latest premiere this year.

‘In Soviet times, I was pressurised to do things the standard way – but everything I do comes from inside, so there’s no option to be different, it’s either my style or no choreography,’ he says as we sit in his rooftop office-cum-eyrie on top of his company’s St Petersburg headquarters.

‘They used to call me a Westerniser. Recently I’ve been called a Russian traditionalist – so I tend to stay a marginal player to what’s fashionable,’ he laughs.

Boris Eifman: ‘Ballet-theatre has lost the “ballet” bit’ (Picture: supplied)

Fashionable or not, Eifman, now 67, is a showman. Since he started his company in 1977, he’s created about 40 works, using stories from Russian literature and biographies that let him imagine extreme states of mind through a modern dance language that adds eye-popping gymnastics to classical technique.

The resulting in-your-face intensity, bold theatricality and overt melodrama have divided critics. But there are always loyal crowds for an Eifman show because it’s fabulously gripping stuff – and Rodin, the new one for British audiences, is no exception.

The story of the French sculptor and his lover/muse/protégée, Camille Claudel, is ideal Eifman territory – Claudel was driven mad by her own artistic talent being overlooked in male-dominated 19th-century Paris, and by Rodin’s refusal to leave the mother of his child for her.

There are lashings of psychological angst – a prime example of the human damage wrought by creative genius.

Madness has cropped up in a lot of Eifman’s work. ‘But the madness of my characters is not the loss of their health or relationship to this world – it’s about a different type of fantasy that becomes available to them,’ he says.

‘They imagine in completely different ways to how we do and that’s why I explore it.’ His upcoming adaptation of Tender Is The Night will, he says, explore schizophrenia. ‘I have the ambition to stage a psychoanalysis session in the show,’ he says. ‘I think what I do with my dancers is to some extent like psychoanalysis.’

Rodin also gives Eifman a chance to replicate some of the sculptor’s famous works in live-body tableaux, drawing a parallel between how sculpture and choreography manipulate human bodies.

Boris Eifman’s Rodin is being performed at London’s Colisuem (Picture: Souheil Michael Khoury)

Eifman’s dancers have extraordinary gymnastic ability. He says they have to undergo a ‘metamorphosis’ to join his company. ‘But while some choreographers work despite the human body, in a way that might be destructive to it, I don’t want to do that. The human shape and the signs they have a similar spirit and hearts as us are important.’

He is now shaping dancers for himself: at the end of last year, with state funding, his company opened post-Soviet Russia’s first new professional ballet school.

He still clearly feels he has a lot to fight for. ‘There is a lot of destruction in the dance world. The modern approach is pushing out neo-classical dance; one tradition has totally suppressed the other, instead of co-existing.

‘Ballet-theatre has lost the “ballet” bit. And because of that, ballet has not become as widely popular as I think it could have become.

‘So what we’re doing now is a counter-measure: now there are more and more entertainment options, our ballet-theatre offers something people can’t get online or in a movie theatre: an emotional engagement with the actual living bodies on stage, speaking a universal [physical] language.’